AUSTIN — Attorney General Ken Paxton, who's still battling securities fraud indictments as he enters re-election year, may just have picked up a new tool to fight the felony charges against him.

For the third time in two years, the federal government has failed to prove investors were willfully swindled into backing a little-known tech startup called Servergy, Inc. The first two times, it was Paxton who was cleared of civil fraud charges brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Now, Servergy founder and former chief executive officer William Mapp III has also been acquitted of intentionally defrauding investors. Last week, a federal jury cleared him on six of seven claims, finding him guilty on one count of negligence.

The Mapp verdict doesn't have a direct or immediate legal effect on Paxton's criminal charges, experts said, but it could help the attorney general as he heads to trial next year. How could Paxton have duped anyone, his lawyers may argue, if the federal government couldn't prove Servergy's own founder intentionally defrauded his investors?

"It is an uphill climb for the prosecutors," said John Teakell, a Dallas attorney who has served assenior trial counsel for the SEC. "Can they prove that he knowingly misrepresented something or knowingly mislead someone?

"They got their work cut out for them."

'Absolute victory'

While Paxton was cleared of the federal claims, he still faces two state felony fraud charges related to his involvement with Servergy and one additional charge of failing to register with the Texas State Securities Board as an investment adviser representative. His trials have been pushed to 2018, just as he's running for re-election.

But despite these challenges, Paxton's spokesman said the Mapp verdict underscored their statements that the charges against the attorney general are spurious.

"As we've said since the beginning of this ordeal, there was nothing to substantiate the SEC's fraud allegations," Matt Welch told The Dallas Morning News a day after the verdict. "A federal judge has twice upheld our position of innocence and now a jury of Texans has all but confirmed it."

Mapp's attorney Jason Lewis called the SEC charges an example of "overreaching" by the feds.

Jurors cleared Mapp of every allegation that he intentionally defrauded Servergy's investors by lying to them about the interest in and quality of the Cleantech-1000, a new server the McKinneyfirm claimed was more efficient than competitors' models. After an eight-day trial, they found Mapp guilty of one count of negligence, a charge unlikely to result in significant fines or other penalties.

"We are very pleased with the jury's verdict finding that Mr. Mapp did not intentionally violate securities laws," Lewis told The News. "While the jury did find one negligence count out of the seven claims brought, we clearly view this as an absolute victory for Mr. Mapp."

'More momentum'

The Mapp verdict could help the attorneys defending Paxton in his criminal case, said Matthew Nielsen, a white-collar crime and government investigations attorney with Stanton LLP in Dallas.

Not only could Mapp be a more trustworthy witness for Paxton, Nielsen said, but the prosecutors pursuing the charges may also have a tougher time painting his alleged crimes as part of a broad criminal scheme that involved the firm's founder and then-CEO.

"To the extent that the prosecutors wanted to come in and make this a case about a fraudulent company, that's pretty much done," Nielsen said. Plus, after Mapp stepped down as Servergy's CEO, the company settled its own suit with the SEC for $200,000, which Nielsen said was "not an amount of money that would indicate massive fraud."

But he cautioned that there are still significant differences between Paxton's state and federal cases, not the least of which is the failure to register charge absent from the civil lawsuits. The failure of the SEC to get a fraud conviction does not absolve Paxton of his criminal charges at the state level.

"The extent of the impact is really unclear," Nielsen said. "There's really no legal effect."

The prosecutors could ask the judge presiding over Paxton's criminal cases to bar jurors from being told about the SEC's failures to convict for intentional fraud. They could argue the state case has nothing to do with federal ones — different lawyers, different laws, different facts and different witnesses — and providing the jurors with information about the latter could unduly influence them.

"If a jury hears that in this case Bill Mapp was found largely not liable, then that could potentially yield an impact on what the state court could find," said Jeff Ansley, a former SEC enforcement attorney and head of Bell Nunnally & Martin's white-collar crimes and regulatory defense practice.

Ansley would not speculate on whether the Mapp verdict was good or bad for Paxton's state case. But he said if he were prosecuting it, he'd try to find jurors who are unfamiliar with the long history of Paxton's case, an imperfect process in the prosecution of any elected official.